Born in 1959

If you were born in 1959, you came into an Australia that was quietly becoming something new. The last year of the decade carried on the comfortable Menzies pattern — solid economy, new suburbs, television in the lounge room, the ritual Saturday arvo at the football — but underneath, things were shifting. The migrants who had arrived in the late forties and early fifties were becoming Australians: their children were in the same classrooms, their milk bars and fish-and-chip shops were on every corner, their accents slowly softening.

The beach culture along the east coast was finding its distinctive Australian character — the surf club, the beach cricket, the particular art of doing nothing on the sand very competently. Afternoon drives out to the new drive-in theatre were a family staple. The Drive-In at Blacktown, at Altona, at Aspley — the speaker on the window, the car full of kids in pyjamas watching a film under the stars.

Johnny O'Keefe's "She's My Baby" was on the wireless. The new A-class Holden was the reliable chariot of the suburban family. You could ride your push-bike to the corner shop and back without a parent's concern.

Life was known, warm, and physically free in a way that would come to define what people meant when they said "the Australia I grew up in.